From banana-seat Schwinns to Divvys, new exhibit puts Chicago's bicycle culture on display

You can’t drive a car in Chicago these days without almost running into a human on a bicycle, and that is sometimes a tragedy, sometimes an annoyance, always a sign of a vibrant place adapting to contemporary urban transportation wisdom.

For those of us who bike frequently through these cluttered streets, it has been heartening to see how much has improved and a little scary to see how far there is to go, both in terms of infrastructure for cyclists and education for those who would pedal on, drive across or step into the green-painted bike lanes.

Bike-friendliness is an evolutionary process, like the current gradual shift from rim to disc brakes. We move a few spins of the crankarms forward and then a couple back. But bike culture is hardly a new thing in this city with deep industrial and working-class roots, as a new exhibition from the institution formerly known as Chicago Design Museum demonstrates.

"Keep Moving: Designing Chicago's Bicycle Culture” puts a Divvy next to a 1970s banana-seat Schwinn next to giant-front-wheeled cycles from the 19th century, all of them designed, in one way or another, in Chicago.

Another in the series of shows backed by the Terra Foundation’s yearlong Art Design Chicago initiative, the exhibition shows how bicycles began as playthings of the leisure class, costing thousands in today’s dollars. Market saturation, though, and the availability of used bikes soon made the vehicles more populist. Dozens of neighborhoods had their own cycling clubs that would compete on tracks in Ravenswood and Garfield Park. African-American cycling hero Major Taylor set a speed record at Garfield.

And turn-of-the-19th century Mayor Carter Harrison courted cyclists as a voting bloc, imagine that, and demonstrated his athletic bona fides by wearing his century pin — signifier of completing a 100-mile ride — on his chest as he posed on his one-speed bicycle.

So if you thought sporting a thick mustache and riding a fixie was something new on city streets, young gentlemen of Logan Square, the look has been done before, and by a politician, no less. And if you, lakefront Lance Armstrongs, thought bicycles that cost thousands was also an innovation, no, that was how cycling actually began, although those early frames were mostly steel, not carbon fiber.

“Keep Moving” is a compact yet rich and rewarding show from the young Chicago Design Museum, recently renamed the — “You’re sitting down?” asked founder and executive director Tanner Woodford — Design Museum of Chicago. It’s in a new, street-level pop-up space for the museum, in the city’s Expo 72 gallery behind the Hot Tix counter at 72 E. Randolph St. in the Loop.

Right outside, naturally, is a heavily trafficked one-way bike lane, where you can find yours truly spinning his way back toward home most workday evenings.

“It's the right moment for the organization to move into a place like this,” Woodford said, a kind of coming-out party for an outfit with new aims of serving the general Chicago community as well as those in the design business. “We’re still kind of new and scrappy and all of that. But I think this show really is positioning us to take another step up.”

Inside, the museum is hoping for more foot traffic than it typically gets in its home since 2014, an upper-floor location in the nearby Block 37 mall (which followed two founding years of doing only pop-up exhibitions). An adjunct to “Keep Moving” will open in the Block 37 space in mid-November, subtitled “Shifting Gears,” and with a different set of bike vignettes, Woodford said. One will show bike poster art, for example, while another will explore world bicycle relief, the vehicle’s potential to help alleviate poverty.

(Bike enthusiasts should also be reminded that Museum of Science and Industry is still showing, in an off-the-beaten-trail gallery, the spectacular Art of the Bicycle.)

The primary exhibit in Expo 72, accessible via a suggested $5 donation, offers “kind of a two-fold perspective,” said curator and design museum head of operations and collections Lauren Boegen. “One is bikes as innovation, which is thinking about the bike itself more as an object: form, function, manufacturing, those more industrial-design type things. And then there is the bike also as a symbol: things like freedom and gender and class and community … and how the bicycle itself transforms into a symbol of those things.”

It’s fascinating to see a couple of the early bicycles in the show, one from about 1899 made by the eventual behemoth Western Wheel Works under its Crescent brand, the other from Featherstone, which in 1891 served up the first U.S.-made bike with air-filled tires. (At one point around then, you learn, two-thirds of American bikes were being made in Chicago.)

These two two-wheelers show how quickly bicycles settled into a logical design; although the Crescent has a shaft-and-gear drive instead of a chain, they could essentially pass for bicycles of today, with three central tubes and a front fork and rear triangle supporting two equal-sized wheels. The more dangerous penny-farthing and velocipede on display, with huge front wheels the rider pedals directly, are from decades earlier.

Squint at the exhibit’s bikes, most mounted cleverly on wooden hills in the gallery’s center, and the Featherstone of yore looks just like the Divvy bike-share vehicle from 2018’s streets, except that the Featherstone is probably a lot lighter and definitely less blue.

“I find that really fascinating as a design story,” Woodford said. “Very quickly they came up with this bike in the front there (the Featherstone), and then you always had basically two wheels and a chain, right?”

But with that enduring template, designers have been tinkering frenetically at the edges ever since, mixing in gears, different brake designs, lighter, stiffer materials and enough accessories to make Cher jealous.

You’ll see views of the drafting table room at Schwinn, the greatest Chicago bike maker and the one to emerge most powerful and most enduring from the flurry of early manufacturers. From those tables came bold new pedal designs, a mid-century modern handlebar bell, and, inspired by the way California kids were modifying bikes, the great hit of the 1960s that Schwinn executives at first vetoed, the Sting-Ray, with its banana seat and chopper handlebars.

The later, fancier, bigger, bright orange Manta-Ray on display even includes an accessory for kids to put their baseball bats in as they rode. Warning: You will want this bike and also the prototype modern one designed specifically for Chicago streets that is on display.

You’ll see revolutionary derailleur design sketches from SRAM, the leading contemporary Chicago bike component company and a force to rival the apexparts maker, the Japanese giant Shimano. SRAM, too, invented the Grip-Shift, a twisting cylindrical gear shifter instead of a lever that became the standard for a time on mountain and adult leisure bikes.

And you’ll see how Chicago design firms came up with the name and various branding ideas for Divvy at its introduction in 2013. The challenge was to appeal to tourists and locals and to quickly demonstrate the “value proposition” of a bike that worked like a ZipCar.

The bike manufacturers represented are multitudinous and largely forgotten: Mead, Ranger, Humber-Rover, Hawthorne, Monark (aluminum framed), Old Hickory (wooden framed), even America Cycle. The aesthetic moved from lots of individual bike makers to the surviving giants such as Schwinn and Montgomery Ward. Even they faded as manufacturing moved overseas, and now a handmade sensibility is returning in places such as Chicago’s Heritage Bicycles, Woodford said.

The way bikes came to symbolize freedom lives on, though. Recently, NBA superstar LeBron James talked about the sense of empowerment and agency two-wheelers delivered in his childhood. And the exhibit shows how bicycles did the same a century earlier for half the population as an early symbol of the women’s movement.

“Sew your own buttons,” one bicycle-wielding woman tells her husband, in a card for a stereoscope, an early version of a ViewMaster. “I’m going for a ride.”

But as the automobile came into prominence, adult bicycling faded, the show explains, and bikes became marketed primarily to kids through the middle part of last century. A full-page magazine ad shows kids host Captain Kangaroo displaying a Schwinn’s quality features like Vanna White displays a word puzzle.

The growing environmental movement began to return bikes to the mainstream adult world, the exhibition says. A poster touts a “Bike Commuter Day” in Chicago from about 1971, billing bikes as the “most efficient urban commuter transit.”

That idea took root. And now, more or less, every day is bike commuter day, especially on busy cycle thoroughfares like Milwaukee Avenue or, indeed, Randolph Street outside of the “Keep Moving” exhibit.

So now outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel touts his efforts to make the city more bike friendly, including a recent lakefront ride with the Tribune’s transportation writer to discuss bike path completion and other pressing locomotion issues.

It’s not that different from the actual campaign slogan that olde time Mayor Harrison employed: “Not the Champion Cyclist, but the Cyclists’ Champion.”

“I’ve got to find another way to say this,” said exhibition curator Boegen. “But everything is cyclical.”